Re: In praise of reckless enthusiasm

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

I think good examples of "reckless enthusiasm" were the ACLS 
History (now Humanities) E-Book and Gutenberg-e projects that 
sprang from the fertile imagination of Robert Darnton, famous 
book historian, former Princeton history professor, and now 
Harvard librarian. While some of us on the advisory committee for 
these projects (like me and Ann Okerson) advised Bob that they 
likely would prove to be unsustainable economically beyond the 
term of the Mellon Foundation grants that gave birth to them, I 
think we are all glad they happened anyway because we have 
learned a great deal from them in their semi-failure. (I say 
"semi" because they both live on in attenuated form.)

I would add that, for university press publishing in particular, 
where capital is in very short supply for experimentation, it 
behooves most presses not to be the pioneers but to let the 
larger presses that can afford to do so, backed by foundation 
grants if need be, forge ahead with "reckless enthusiasm" and try 
out new things, which the smaller presses can then adopt, or not, 
once the concept has been proven and the bugs worked out.  Among 
such projects in the past couple of decades I would place in this 
category are the National Academies Press experiment with "open 
access" monograph publishing (which Michigan and Penn State are 
applying to humanities publishing), Project Muse at Johns 
Hopkins, and Chicago's launch of the BiblioVault (the last two 
also supported by Mellon).

So I'm all for "reckless enthusiasm" just so long as you have the
capital needed to take risks and still survive if you fail!

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press



>I think this is the best "Joe Esposito piece" that I have read.
>Bernie Sloan
>
>--- On Sun, 1/3/10, Terry Ehling <ehling@cornell.edu> wrote:
>
>From: Terry Ehling <ehling@cornell.edu>
>Subject: In praise of reckless enthusiasm
>To: "liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu" <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
>Date: Sunday, January 3, 2010, 7:04 PM
>
>Joe Esposito endorses unruly expectations and reckless
>enthusiasm:
>
>http://bit.ly/5DXw3p
>
>"It appears to be the rule that a reckless investment to preserve
>a practice or institution ultimately yields very little in the
>way of serendipitous outcomes, but crazy projects designed to
>bring new capacity on board may come to delight us all.
>
>"[M]y personal reckless enthusiasm: to build infrastructure that
>enables an unmediated, direct connection between scholars and
>scholarly materials. For example, there is a huge need for a new
>order of bibliographical records, which are transparent to
>end-users and easily integrated into machine-to-machine
>communications. Such records will be very expensive to create; no
>one knows how they will ultimately earn their keep."
>
>terry ehling
>scholarly communications strategist
>library information technologies
>project euclid | cornell university library


-- 
Sanford G. Thatcher
Executive Editor for Social Sciences and Humanities
Penn State University Press
8201 Edgewater Drive
Frisco, TX  75034-5514
e-mail: sgt3@psu.edu
Phone: (214) 705-9010
http://www.psupress.org

"If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying."-John Ruskin (1865)

"The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people
who can write know anything."-Walter Bagehot (1853)